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Troops Home Now? | ||
Pamela Olson August 15, 2006 | ||
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A friend asked me whether I thought it was more irresponsible to bring the troops home from Iraq now or later. Here is my reply:
Based on everything I know about the Iraq conflict, American troops cannot stop the sectarian violence that their occupation created and fostered. There were sectarian tensions before 2003, but those tensions did not explode until the American leadership's incompetence created and fostered the lawlessness, violence, hopelessness, depravity, and hatred that allowed the thugs to flourish and the tensions to turn to vengeful violence. Sunni and Shia Muslims are not any more inevitable enemies that Muslims and Christians or Muslims and Jews or Christians and Jews or Catholics and Protestants or Buddhists and Socialists. I don't know the real motivations behind the current perpetrators of sectarian violence in Iraq, or if it was started by a ghastly mistake (or sabotage - by whom?) that invited recrimination and then even more ghastly counter-recrimination, all fostered by the total lack of any security or hope offered by the occupier. I don't know how many are out for money and power, and how many are motivated by cyclical revenge or other factors. But I do know that ordinary Iraqis hate it, the American military can't stop it, and a quisling Iraqi Army can't stop it either. America's military can't create an Iraqi Army that will act as a subcontractor for American occupation in the next year or ten years or fifty years. The Iraqis are too smart for us, too fed up with foreign domination. (If anyone reading this believes Bush is concerned about genuine Arab democracy, permit me to direct your attention to our democratically elected ally, the Lebanese government, and Bush's help for them in their darkest hour, to say nothing of the sanctions to punish Palestinians for their democratic choices. Arabs aren't nearly simpleminded enough to give this lie -- that Bush cares about Arab self-determination -- an iota of credence.) The American presence in Iraq is only postponing the day when Iraqis will have to determine their own future out of the apocalypse the Bush Administration has made out of their beautiful country. That won't be easy. But our continued presence there won't make it any easier. American generals and their civilian leadership don't have the skills, the wisdom, the vision, the talent, or the incentive to do right by the Iraqi people. And they're not doing any good for themselves by pretending to try. So they should declare an intention to withdraw troops within a fixed timetable as soon as possible, as most Iraqis wish. When the American troops leave, at least it will be clearer who the enemy is. The most hated and thuggish of the insurgents will have lost their best recruiting tools and their professed raison d'etre. If they keep killing civilians, they will no longer have the pretext that "We are promoting instability to force the occupier to leave." They will be seen simply as thugs and criminals instead of the depraved rock opposite the unbearable American hard place. Only then can Iraqis be genuinely motivated to fight them, when it will be for their own security and interests, and not for America's. The only way an Iraqi army -- or better, an Iraqi police force, which is what they actually need right now -- can have a genuine mandate is if it is built with the knowledge that it will take meaningful command in the Iraqi interest. The Iraqi army or police force will never have a genuine and lasting mandate if it's seen as maintaining law and order on behalf of American interests. If the U.S. Army were seen to be maintaining law and order here on behalf of Chinese interests, how many of us would tolerate that? Americans, even on the left, are afraid to look into the abyss of withdrawal because we can't see what will happen, and we know people will die, and we know the leadership of our country, such as they are, created this mess, and we know we have responsibility to help fix it. But we also can't see what will happen if we do stay indefinitely. We don't have any vision or workable method of ever withdrawing or fixing the problems. So what do we expect, that we'll maintain the status quo forever? This is politically and financially unsustainable. And the longer we go on, the harder the inevitable choice will be to make. People are already dying in horrific numbers. Our leadership did create this mess, spectacularly dishonestly, corruptly, and incompetently. But unfortunately, and self-evidently, these same people, with their same mentality, are not the ones who can fix it. Only the Iraqi people have any hope of fixing their own mess, if they can summon the wherewithal to do so once we step back and give them the chance. Our name is stained and disgraced in the Arab world for more good reasons than I have time to recount here. What our leaders have done to them, to their children and women and dignity, beggars belief. Imagine if someone walked into your home and burned your family photos and killed your family and trashed all your possessions, and then said, "Here, let me help you clean it up. Only one implicit catch: I'll be in charge of rebuilding it to my tastes, without giving you much of a genuine say about the things I particularly care about." Would you invite them to stay? (If you don't believe the Bush Administration and their functionaries are meddling unduly in the government and economy of Iraq, you aren't paying attention -- which is understandable, given that our media isn't, either.) If the intruder refused to leave, what might you resort to rather than suffer the indignity of cooperating with them? Even if you genuinely thought they might help rebuild your house in a way that would benefit you as well as them, you'd probably rather be left alone to rebuild your own house. There would be no way around heartbreak at that point. But the choice would be between dignified or undignified heartbreak. There's only so much you can do to someone and still have any hope that they might cooperate with you willingly. This, in my best understanding, is how the Iraqis feel. The sooner we let them know when we will get out of their house, the sooner they can pause, and weep, and take a very deep breath, and consider their options, and fight their criminals, and determine their own path from this broken, diminished point on. Eventually from this, hopefully, the educated population will rise and build, civil society will grow and, as in Palestine and Lebanon, elections will take place, or some other modernization and liberalization will likely be demanded, indigenously. (That is, if we don't support a strongman dictator like we did Saddam against his own people when it suited our interests.) Islamists might win for a while because they were the only organization that managed to flourish under the severe duress of dictatorship followed by occupation, the only people disciplined enough and willing to provide basic social services. This may be distasteful for the West, to think that our policies created Islamist regimes that don't necessarily share our values, and in some cases don't share the values of many of the people they claim to represent. But this was the logical and foreseeable outcome of our policies. In Iran, America overthrew their democratically-elected leader Mossadeq in 1953 and installed the Shah. The Shah repressed indigenous Iranian movements for greater democracy, rolled back Mossadeq's nationalization of Iranian resources, and drove politics into the mosque -- the only place where people were allowed to gather and organize. In this light, the rise of the Ayatollahs was nothing particularly surprising. In Egypt we see the same thing. America supports the repressive Mubarak, who quashes secular democratic movements, and the only people able to organize against him effectively are the Muslim Brotherhood. Israel has consistently disempowered and humiliated the secular Fatah party, all but inviting Hamas to take power. But after Iraqis have had security for a while, after the West has stopped brutalizing and humiliating them for a while, after civil society and education are back on track and growing in strength, then genuine moves for indigenous democracy and greater openness can take place. And only then. Only after people have had time to rebuild and think seriously about the future, instead of just worrying about the next time Israel or America will come in and destroy everything they've built. How stupid do you think secular, Western-looking Lebanese feel right now, that they cooperated with Bush and built a stronger and more open economy, expelled the Syrian occupation, and created businesses and built excellent bridges and hospitals and everything else, only to have it all destroyed during the past month by Israel while Bush looked on? How many decades do you think it will be before anyone in the Middle East makes the outrageously naive mistake of trusting America to do right by them? Iraqis will falter and fail and make mistakes, but they will do it genuinely, do it by themselves, and learn how to fix their problems by themselves. They will likely invite professionals and advisors from the West to help them on certain political and technical problems. But on Iraqi (or Lebanese or Palestinian) terms, and not as subjugated people with no real say in their own futures. Not since Hulagu Khan in 1258 (heir of Genghis Khan) has Iraq been so devastated as we have done. But even after that, even after Baghdad was completely flattened, its inhabitants slaughtered with the efficacy of an atomic bomb... well, they still hadn't quite recovered even by the time Britain, Saddam, and America got their hands on it. But they survived. They rebuilt. They learned. And they will do it again, once we leave. They will do it for themselves and by themselves. Their patience for foreign rule has plumb run out. The sooner we make it clear when we will leave, and leave for good with no permanent bases or economic control, and provide them the time and space to figure out their own lives, the better. The longer we stay, the longer we delay the inevitable, the more people will be dying in the meantime, and the harder it will be for them to pick up the pieces once we are finally forced to leave -- particularly if we are forced to leave one day, as in Vietnam, quickly and without a plan. Staying in is cowardly. It is refusing to admit that the entire adventure was a disastrous blunder, impeachable to say the very least. The Bush Administration is refusing to pay for their mistakes, choosing instead to pawn them off on dead servicement, dead Iraqis, and whatever unfortunate new administration takes up their scorched and fetid mantle in 2008. We should announce a firm date of withdrawal as soon as possible. But the Bush administration will not. They will not pull out with their tail between their legs and declare the adventure a total loss. It's politically unfeasible. There is no way they will leave the pipelines and wells and monopolies Americans have spent so much blood and treasure trying to secure. There's no way this administration will abandon the permanent bases they've built in Iraq or the wrong-headed ideologies that put them there. There's no way the Bush Administration can admit that other people have rights to liberty and self-determination, because that will betray their belief that only America and its allies are allowed to have and use force. Neo-cons (and Likudniks) don't negotiate or cooperate or compromise. They dictate and then back up their diktats with overwhelming force. Well, guess what? If Israel in Lebanon right now, and America in Iraq right now, aren't proving that hard power alone can't cow the world into looking out for our security and interests, I don't know what it will take. America and Israel are not islands. We are not alone in this world. We have neighbors, and they are exactly as human as we are, deserving of the exact same rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Good luck with your Missile Defense and your screening of liquids on airplanes. I'd rather make friends. But if we choose to dehumanize whole countries and inflict tremendous and indiscriminate violence against them, we shouldn't be surprised if we face resistance. It's dangerous to act like a gangster, and it always has been. No doubt in Iraq, we'll continue to pour good money after bad, good blood after bad, until either we get another administration or something happens that gives us an excuse to pull out or we just get worn down. The Vietnam-era governments knew it was hopeless a long time before they actually pulled out. They knew their men were dying in vain. But they were too cowardly to do what was unpleasant but necessary. After we pulled out, the North Vietnamese declared victory and took over, making conditions difficult for many south Vietnamese. America was humiliated. We betrayed our south Vietnamese allies, heartbreakingly. We had to admit that the whole adventure was a bloody, miserable, depraved failure from start to finish. But 13 years later, the Vietnamese communist government undertook economic reforms and opened naturally, peacefully, willingly, to the world economy. By 1995, the U.S. and Vietnam resumed friendly diplomatic relations. The "Communist threat" is long gone in any case -- the Vietnam war never really had an important impact on the Cold War, except to expose the U.S. leadership as depraved, feckless, and weak. Likewise, the War in Iraq has nothing to do with the 9/11-style terrorism that Bush says is our New Enemy, except to strengthen its partisans by making us look depraved, feckless, and weak. The goals of the Vietnam war were accomplished in a genuine way only after we stopped spending our blood and treasure. We lost a lot by leaving Vietnam, but what could we have possibly gained by staying? What can we possibly gain by staying in Iraq? Does anyone believe our leadership will actually train up a strong Iraqi army to secure oil wells and street security on America's behalf? Or that American troops will be able to sustainably do that themselves, when they are already over-stretched and things are just getting worse? Or that any Iraqi will truly support and believe in an Iraqi government that can't really act without American approval? After all that we've done to them? Pulling out is a scary option that will have uncertain consequences, some of which will certainly be bad. But staying in is a much worse option.
Beginning in 1970 US combat roles were turned over to the Vietnamese military under a program known as Vietnamization. However, corruption, nepotism, incompetence and a long standing dependence on the US military left the Vietnamese military ill prepared to continue the war. All American combat troops were withdrawn by March 29, 1973. Advisors and support troops remained until April 1975. The Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973 formally recognized the sovereignty of both sides, however the war continued until the North overpowered the South on April 30, 1975 and unified the country under the North Vietnamese rule known as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam or Vietnam. After the reunification, political and economic conditions remained difficult. Millions of South Vietnamese fled the unelected, communist government and became boat people over the next two decades. In late 1978 the Vietnamese army removed the Khmer Rouge from power in Cambodia. Only one month later, however, partially in retaliation, China launched a short-lived incursion into Vietnam, which became known as the Sino-Vietnamese War. Both sides claimed to have been victorious in the brief conflict. In 1986, the Communist Party of Vietnam implemented economic reforms known as Doi Moi (renovation). During much of the 1990s, economic growth was rapid, and Vietnam reintegrated into the international community. It re-established diplomatic relations with the United States in 1995, one year after the United States' trade embargo on Vietnam was repealed. | ||